An Invincible Summer
by Troll Princess
Summary: A HLTerminator crossover. (No, seriously.) Joe mets someone on a trip to Mexico with Duncan and Richie who will change his life forever. A "Pairing List That Ate Fandom" story.


Title: An Invincible Summer  
  
Author: Troll Princess  
  
Warnings: Bad words, sexual situations, and the possibility of imminent armageddon. Do with that what you will.  
  
Fandoms: Highlander: The Series/The Terminator Series  
  
Spoilers for: All of both. I tweaked a some of Season Five and the beginning of Season Six of HL so I could get the timelines to jive, though, so if I screwed up a little canon, well, there's your warning. (And like HL couldn't have used a good canon-fucking back then. Sheesh.)  
  
Written for: The Pairing List That Ate Fandom, located at http://www.livejournal.com/users/trollprincess/253955.html#cutid1  
  
Author's note: The title is taken from a quote by Albert Camus, "In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."  
  
**********An Invincible Summer**********  
  
When Joe first sees her, he's just getting back to his hotel from busting Duncan out of the morgue.  
  
He hadn't expected Mexican morgues to be any cleaner than American morgues, but he doesn't have much basis for comparison in either category as you'd think, and the fact remains that they're both filled with corpses. No place can be totally clean that stores the remains of the dead, no matter how many industrial-strength cleaners they use to douse the smell.  
  
When Mac woke up, the heavy, sick-sweet scent of death still clung to him.  
  
It went to show how long Joe'd been familiar with it when all it did was make him sneeze.  
  
The wound wasn't bad, so his clothes didn't need to be changed so much as covered where the blood showed through. And luckily, he hadn't been carrying any identiication, but that'll happen when some lousy street punk boosts your wallet before he shoots you. Only Duncan MacLeod could get himself killed on the first day of a two-week vacation with Richie in Baja. Joe chastises Mac for getting spotted by a passerby before he could come back to life, then keeps a lookout while Duncan makes a run for the rental car. That's good old Joe, lookout for a dead man.  
  
Getting him back into his hotel is easier. Mac buys a cheap, too-small T-shirt off of a street vendor, then changes quickly and ducks out the car and into a swarm of overeager tourists heading into the fancy beachside resort he's booked into.   
  
"Thanks, Joe," he calls over his shoulder. "I owe you one."   
  
Joe wonders if he should tell Mac he still smells a little like the morgue, then decides against it and drives to where he's staying.  
  
His hotel hides behind a strip of tourist traps and fast-food joints, a quaint place with overly elegant architecture that puts the cluster of Burger Kings before it to shame. If he were a better friend, he probably would have given Duncan, currently entrenched in a hotel overrun with at least three different medical conventions, a head's-up to the quiet family inn chock full of vacancies.   
  
Then again, he's just spent the better part of an hour in a room full of dead people. Quite frankly, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod can go screw himself.  
  
Joe gets out of the rental car, rolling down the windows a bit to let the smell out and not giving a damn whether or not someone boosts it, and walks heavily up the cobblestone path towards the closest entrance. He's tired, and he knows he smells slightly like death, and he really just wants to go up to his room and soak in the tub until his fingertips go pruney and the muscles in his thighs loosen up.   
  
So this, of course, is the perfect time to see her.  
  
He's used to being able to detail people like a cop, so his mind immediately picks up the unimportant things first. Five feet six, a hundred and twenty pounds of wiry muscle, blue-grey eyes, long blond-brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. Then he lets himself take in the other stuff -- the way she walks past him with the singlemindedness of a soldier with a mission, the teenage boy trailing beside her who looks too much like her to be anything but her son, the handgun tucked under her weathered leather jacket that he doubts anyone but him would have noticed.  
  
She narrows her eyes at Joe, noticing him notice her, and stares him down until he has to turn away before she does.   
  
It's an intriguing first for him.  
  
********  
  
The next day, Joe spots her in the lobby, throws all caution to the wind, and asks her out. She tells him to fuck off.  
  
He asks her again the next day. She looks down at his cane and tells him no.  
  
God help him for an idiot, but he figures what the hell and asks her again the day after that when she's about to get into her Jeep with the kid. She looks down at his legs and asks where he lost them.  
  
"Vietnam," he snaps. "Why? Did you find a couple spares lying around?"  
  
She laughs at that, and the kid stares at her as if she's grown an extra head or a third leg.   
  
Twenty minutes later, they're in his room fucking their brains out.  
  
********  
  
She tells him her name is Sarah when they get to the door, and he tells her his name is Joe, and both of them are pretty sure they're aliases. But they head in anyway, and are in the middle of a heated kiss before the door's even closed.   
  
The sex is ... well, he's not really sure. It's entirely possible that this is the best sex Joe Dawson has ever had in his miserable life, but he just can't summon up the energy to power his brain to try remembering. She watches patiently as he removes the prosthetics, peeling off her own clothes like they're playing some off-kilter version of Strip Hokey Pokey. You take off your shirt, I'll take off my left leg ...  
  
When the prosthetics are safely out of the way, she pounces.  
  
Afterwards, she runs her fingers over his scars with the practiced touch of someone who's both been on the giving and receiving end of them. "So," she says, "war wounds, huh?"  
  
His jaw tightens, but he nods.  
  
She fucks him afterwards like it's a prize for a right answer.  
  
********  
  
The kid isn't a problem so much as an annoyance. But then again, spend enough time around Richie Ryan will give anyone vast experience with annoyances.  
  
Sarah tells him later that the kid's name is John, and he's seventeen. Joe doesn't believe either, just like he doesn't believe she works in security and he suspects she doesn't buy that he just owns a couple of blues bars and that's it. But he plays along because he can already tell that Sarah is someone who doesn't suffer questioning well. He still hasn't asked about the significance of the handgun, but he's not all that sure he wants to know. Around Sarah, he likes being in the dark.  
  
Probably a little too much, but still.  
  
John tells Joe that if he hurts Sarah, the kid'll make sure he regrets it.  
  
Being around Sarah makes Joe feel a little cockier, a little more free with the gallows humor. "What are you going to do," he asks, "break my kneecaps?"  
  
John doesn't laugh at that, but he leaves the room too fast for his laughing it up in another room not to be an option.  
  
********  
  
The vacation ends soon enough. Duncan picks up three fairly expensive pieces of local art and a one-night stand of his own. Richie went to a couple of racetracks and spends the entire plane trip back to Seacouver complaining about breaking his leg in three places while surfing and having to hang out behind a rock for an hour while the damn thing healed properly.  
  
Joe missed all of it. When they ask him where he was for the last two weeks, he nearly tells them he was off getting laid.  
  
He smiles at the thought, and now they're really curious. It's another two weeks before they lay off and stop asking him about it.   
  
********  
  
Joe left his phone number behind with Sarah because ... Jesus, he's not even sure why. She's probably a criminal, and there were times in Baja when he wondered whether all of her cards were shuffled into the deck the right way. But he'd given it to her anyway, knowing she'd throw it away the second he turned his back. Hell, she'd probably swallow it and deny all knowledge of it.  
  
She calls on a Thursday. "Hey, Joe," she says, her deep, husky voice warming him even over the phone lines. "Got any plans for this weekend?"  
  
He's back in Baja on Friday morning.   
  
********  
  
She drops the bombshell over dinner that weekend like it doesn't mean anything. "Pass the salt, I have leukemia." She even uses the same words, for Christ's sake.  
  
Joe stares at her for a long moment, trying to think of what to say first. She smiles at his reaction, then leans forward. "It's terminal, too. Would you mind handing me the pepper while you're at it?"  
  
He doesn't say anything. Just passes her the goddamn salt and pepper.   
  
********  
  
It's like that for the next year or so, give or take a few months. Joe'll get a call every few weeks, like she's storing up enough energy to see him and after his visits, she just lets herself waste away a while. He never can see it, though. Her body clings to life with a force so strong he's reminded of a toddler refusing to move until it gets what it wants. Hell, she looks better dying of leukemia than some people do in the prime of life. He's almost annoyed at that.  
  
Sometimes, he gets a call on Wednesday. Sometimes, it's last thing on Friday night, as if she's totally forgotten about him.  
  
That never stops him from going back to Baja, though.   
  
John only stops him at the door once. He opens it and looks at Joe with his bedraggled hair and clothes and dark, ominous circles around his eyes. He may have been crying, but Joe's not stupid enough to ask. "Go home," he says, in a weak monotone.  
  
Joe clutches his cane with clenched, bone-white knuckles. "Is she --"  
  
"Go home, Joe," Sarah calls out from inside the house. She coughs at the end, like sickly punctuation.  
  
He debates whether or not to go inside anyway, then notices John staring at him as if analyzing him like a psychologist performing an experiment. His jaw tightening, Joe nods at the kid and heads back to the airport.   
  
Then he calls Methos and asks for a list of Alexa's doctors.  
  
********  
  
Sarah treats the cancer more like a bother than anything else, and if she hadn't blurted it out over the entree, Joe never would have known.   
  
Well, except for that one weekend. But she never lets him talk about it, and when he hands her the list of phone numbers for some of the top oncologists in the world, she laughs at it as if he's told her the funniest dirty joke he knows.  
  
She never shows weakness, not in the least. It's like she's being watched and graded by someone, like she'll suffer the worst of punishments if she receives the help rather than giving it. Once, Joe tries to help her carry some shopping from her Jeep into her small cabin home and she doesn't speak to him for the rest of the weekend.   
  
Her last words before the silent treatment are, "Give 'em to John." Then she slams the back of the Jeep shut and storms into the house.  
  
The kid gives him a look that might not border on sympathetic, but it's possible it's on the same continent.   
  
Of course, just because she doesn't speak to him doesn't mean she avoids crawling into his bed that night.  
  
********  
  
The kid's strange.  
  
Not as strange as his mom, but still. Joe likes him well enough, of course, but John has his moments when Joe wonders if he's wandered into the wrong conversation by accident.   
  
John once follows him down to a cheap newsstand down the street from Sarah's house, then asks Joe in front of the soda case where he lives when he isn't picking up "dying women hiding out from the law." Joe refuses to rise to the bait and brings up his apartment in Seacouver, the blues club in Paris and the one he's thinking of buying in New Orleans just because he's finally got enough starting capital.   
  
The kid narrows his eyes and says, "You might want to look into moving to the country," then grabs a lemon-lime soda and heads back up to the house without waiting for a ride.  
  
And he doesn't blame the kid for thinking it, but Joe gets the impression John's already martyred her in his head. He overhears the kid making small talk with some wide-eyed Mexican girl outside of the hotel, and he thinks maybe John knows he's listening.  
  
He tells the girl Sarah's dying and doing it badly, that she weighs ninety pounds now -- which isn't true, that the cancer's only getting worse -- which unfortunately is true, and that she's barely clinging onto life with both hands just to make sure the world doesn't end right after she does.  
  
The scary part is, Joe's starting to think that last bit is true.  
  
********  
  
They know they both have secrets, but up until now they've always kept them to themselves.  
  
One night in bed, Sarah says, "The hell with this. I don't have enough time left to screw with this secretive shit."  
  
They tow the kid along and tell each other over drinks at some hole-in-the-wall bar that Sarah knows. Not the cleanest place in the world, but the music's good and bluesy, if not actual blues, and the tourist quotient's low.  
  
Sarah goes first, telling him about robots set to kill and one night stands with time-traveling soldiers and the nuclear war that was supposed to come. Her eyes sparkle with a false sense of pride as she tells him how they stopped the upcoming apocalypse, then elbows the kid in the side. John stops tearing up his paper napkin and forces a weak smile and a grudging agreement.  
  
Joe wonders how the kid could still exist if the war was stopped, but he says nothing.  
  
"Well, go on," Sarah says, and her smile turns genuine for a moment. "Now, it's your turn. What's your big secret, huh? Couple of extra wives in the states or something?"  
  
So Joe tells them about Immortals and Duncan MacLeod, how he's been a Watcher ever since the war ended for him. He rambles on about Richie and Amanda and Methos like they're friends and not subjects, and he wonders when he's ever done that around someone who isn't a Immortal. He even goes so far as to explain the biology of it all, the Quickening and the foundlings and the Game and all that.  
  
Sarah and John exchange a look and frown. "That is incredibly fucking unfair," Sarah declares, and downs a shot.  
  
They never speak of either secret again.  
  
********   
  
The last time Joe Dawson sees Sarah Connor alive, she's lying in a hospital bed with a gunshot wound in her shoulder.  
  
Later on, when he's stuck in Paris dealing with the whole Ahriman thing, when he's burying Richie and dealing with a more-angst-ridden-than-normal MacLeod, he dwells on that mental image more than he should. She'll still be alive the next time you go back, he tells himself, because most normal people with terminal leukemia end up in the hospital because of the cancer and she ends up there after getting herself shot stopping a goddamn robbery.  
  
It'd almost be funny, if it weren't so damn depressing.  
  
She had gotten shot before she'd even called him in Paris, but she hadn't mentioned it over the phone, which was something he'd expect from her. Shot in the line of something vaguely resembling real duty and he'd just bet she was more angry some robber at the hotel had ruined a perfectly good tank top by getting blood all over it.   
  
"Oh, hell, this is nothing," she says with a smile. "I'll bet the two of us could sit here and compare scars like that scene in 'Jaws' for hours."  
  
Joe's seen her in all her naked glory. Unfortunately, he knows she's not kidding.   
  
And if they counted emotional scars ... well, hell, they could be arguing back and forth until Christmas.   
  
"I can't stay long," Joe says to her, sitting on the edge of the bed and holding her hand between both of his. For a second, he almost feels more like a contrite husband than a sometimes-lover. "Work ... you know."  
  
"I know," she says. The smile slips a bit, but she forces it into submission and plasters it right back on. Typical Sarah, he thinks.  
  
He tries to think of something to say, but can't, and the two of them share an awkward look. Joe gets up to leave, clutching his cane like a security blanket, then can't stop himself from leaning forward and kissing her gently on the forehead.   
  
Then Joe walks out as quickly as he can manage, because he doubts Sarah wants him to see her cry.   
  
********  
  
He gets the postcard in the mail the day he books the plane ticket back to Baja.  
  
It's a pretty photo, some red-brown cliffside rising above rolling whitewater rapids, and Joe thinks it looks like the bottom of the Grand Canyon but probably isn't. There's twice as much postage as it needs, John's attempt to make sure this sorry excuse for an obituary makes it into his hands. The address is typed in neat, perfect French, a language John damn well doesn't know. Joe suspects the kid went to an international bank and unloaded one hell of a sob story on whoever could make sure the address for the club was spelled exactly how it should be.  
  
Two sentences are scrawled in John's tight, anxious handwriting on the back of it. "She died at the end of August," says one line. Another line, hastily added underneath, says, "I wasn't kidding about moving to the country."   
  
Joe doesn't leave his apartment for a week.  
  
He's tempted to find out where John's gone off to, to take some responsibility for the poor kid, to do something for the last piece of Sarah he's got left. But a few strained phone calls to Sarah's friends in Baja tell him what he already suspected, that John was gone long before they'd spread her ashes over the ocean. Joe's not surprised.  
  
He alternates between crying, playing the blues, and doing both at once for a few days, then moves on to getting drunk with Methos and swapping "The last woman I loved wasted away before my eyes" stories. Methos brings the beer, and Joe brings the latest anecdotes about what they can't do for a dying woman in this modern age of medicine.   
  
After a year or so of feeling like he's ben kicked in the stomach, he sells the bars -- first the one in Paris, and then, after a lot of soul-searching, the one in Seacouver.   
  
He feels so free, he can't resign from the Watchers fast enough.   
  
He spends a lot of time talking to Methos, for some odd reason -- probably because he's sure Methos has heard and seen it all and left shock long behind -- so he's not all that surprised when he blurts out Sarah's stories of nuclear war and John's scribbled words on that postcard. He rambles on about it to lengths he's sure he would never do with Duncan, and the whole time he looks to Methos as if begging him to come up wih a solution.  
  
Methos stares at him for a long time, quietly nursing a beer as he does. His free hand is tucked behind his back. It's entirely possible it's trembling.  
  
Finally, Methos exhales heavily and says, "Now that you're officially retired from the Watchers, maybe you should move out to the country. I've got a nice place out in the desert, someplace in Nevada, I think. I never go there, but it'd be a nice change to have someone mooch off me for a while, and it is a pretty old building. Actually, it's ..."  
  
He takes another pull off his beer, and Joe frowns. "What?"  
  
"Well," Methos says, "it just happens to have a fallout shelter." 


End file.
